Interfaces tab

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With the Interfaces tab, you can specify what interface is used for the outgoing connection. Usually you can accept the default option of ‘Any interface’. In the example above, we have selected to only make outgoing requests on the interface 203.96.8.238. This interface has a full-time connection to the Internet and is the fastest, so it makes sense to do so. If you wanted to disable that card, it is not working or was to slow, we might change this to IPROLINK, a dialed connection to an ISP.

The real advantage of this tab is the third option. Rotating connections allows multiple interfaces to be used. If you have say an ISDN and a T1 connection to the Internet, you can put both in the ‘In Use’ list. Next time a request is made to WinGate for a Web page on the internet, WinGate can use the least recently used interface that is listed. This allows a greater bandwidth than a single connection, meaning better speed. The connections are used concurrently. In NT you can have multiple modem connections.

Tips:

You can’t have multiple instances of a Dialer profile in Windows. To enable multiple connections with the same details to the same ISP, simply create a 2nd dialer profile with a different name but otherwise the same details. Select both these in the interfaces tab.

With this mechanism, you can ‘reserve’ a connection for special events. You may have two ISP accounts. One slow but cheap, one fast and expensive. You could make most of the services use the cheaper dialer profile, while FTP could use the fast connection. As FTP downloads are less common than email use or normal surfing, the expensive connection is used less frequently. You could also setup a second HTTP proxy that only uses this fast dialer profile, and only allow access to certain people.

In fact the request is made via the interface that was first online, but when the data is returned, it is sent to the specified interface.